The Myth of Unconditional Love

While watching the above trailer for Amazon’s Transparent, I was struck by the tagline, “Love is unconditional.” In the context of a show about a transgender father who comes out to his grown children, the idea seems clear. If his children love him, they won’t care that he thinks he’s a woman.

Is that true though? Do I need to accept anything my loved ones say, think, or do for them to remain loved ones? Does love require universal acceptance?

The popular notion of “unconditional love” emerges from post-modern moral relativism. It is an interpersonal application of the idea that everything is equally valid and equally true. In that context, judgment has become hate. The rhetoric of the gay-rights movement, and of the broader anti-rational Marxist culture, leans heavily on this idea. One cannot disagree with the gay orthodoxy without being labeled a hater. So it makes sense that Amazon would remind us, in their marketing for a transgender drama, that love is supposedly unconditional.

We're dealing with a particularly insidious lie that cheapens love by transmuting it from a value-based emotional response to an autonomic pleasantry. Put another way, unconditional love is nothing special. If love is unconditional, then anyone deserves it. If anyone deserves it, then the particulars of an individual’s behaviors, beliefs, and values do not matter.

Imagine how your significant other would react if, upon asking why you love them, you replied with, “No reason.” Imagine they pressed, and you expounded with, “I love you the same as I would love anyone. It doesn’t matter to me who you are, what you think, what you do, or what you believe or stand for. I love you in spite of you, as I would love anyone in your place.”

How would that go over?

Ironically, the unconditional love crowd typically punctuate their rhetoric with the sentiment “love people for who they are.” But that doesn’t make the least bit of sense. You can’t both love someone for who they are and love them unconditionally. Their identity is a condition. They are not someone else. From this we quickly realize that the real exhortation of "unconditional love" is to accept whatever taboo, be it homosexuality, transgenderism, or any of a hundred other things.

Unconditional love is a particularly vicious argument from intimidation, as we’ll explore on the next page.